I believe God wants us to be successful … and yet success is not always obvious. The Chinese bamboo tree does absolutely nothing — or so it seems — for the first four years. Then suddenly, sometime during the fifth year, it shoots up ninety feet in sixty days. Would you say that bamboo tree grew in six weeks, or five years?
I think our lives are akin to the Chinese bamboo tree. Sometimes we put forth effort, put forth effort, and put forth effort … and nothing seems to happen. But if you do the right things long enough, you’ll receive the rewards of your efforts.
S. Truett Cathy
Imagine the elation of architect Robert Mills. On that day in 1836, the fledgling Washington National Monument Society announced they had chosen his plans for the soon-to-be-constructed monument to the nation’s first president. Mills had slaved for months over the elaborate drawings, and he had dared to dream big — a granite obelisk soaring over 555 feet high. It would be no less than the tallest structure in the world. Mills had designed many other buildings in his career, but this monument was different. And now his dreams were becoming reality.
But the funds didn’t come in as fast as the society had hoped. Construction wasn’t able to begin for five years, ten years — a full twelve years later. Then the engineers discovered the ground at the site was too soft to support the weight of the huge monument, so they had to start over farther north. Work proceeded fairly smoothly for six years, and major figures began donating marble to the project. But in 1854, when Pope Pius IX donated a marble block from the Temple of Concord, a group of saboteurs stole the block and destroyed it. The incident shocked the public, and donations nearly stopped. Then members of the Know-Nothing political party broke into the society’s offices and actually seized possession of the monument. Vandals continued to deface the monument, and construction finally stopped dead in 1855.
What remained of Mills’s soaring dream was a squat, ugly 150-foot stump. When Robert Mills died that year, he must have died with a broken heart.1
When I read about Mills’s profound disappointment — the slow, fitful progress; the interruptions; the harassing circumstances; the glorious dream begging for fulfillment — I was struck by how similar his feelings were to those of some pastors.
One Presbyterian minister recalls his days in a congregation in New Jersey. “I loved that church, and I poured myself into it. The church really needed to turn around, and I began to see signs of that. New people began to come. In about five years, 40 percent of the church was new people.
“But trying to get anything done was next to impossible. Convincing the Session to try something new was hard enough, but then the trustees would have to allocate the funds for it. And the trustees and the Session could never seem to agree.
“I had a couple who were marvelous youth group leaders. They were young, they had great hearts, and they were really doing something with the kids. But everything they tried to do was blocked. The church owned a house that the couple wanted to use for the kids. It would have been great, and I pushed for it, but the trustees kept dragging their feet. It finally came down to a fire extinguisher — the trustees wouldn’t finance a fire extinguisher they needed to meet the code. The couple gave up and quit leading the youth group.
“After a few battles like that, I realized I wasn’t going to change things any time soon. It was going to take at least ten years, and by that time I would have died. So I left.”
No change. No growth. No progress. Nothing moving ahead that says, “You’re doing a good job.” Situations like this dog some pastors. They can’t shake the feeling that all their work and dreams will never move beyond the awkward, 150-foot stump of their present situation.
The Leadership survey revealed three major factors that lead pastors to cry out, “I can’t see any progress!” They vary in intensity and difficulty, but each in its own way hinders the mission ministers long to complete and leads to discouragement:
• constant interruptions
• lethargic church boards
• slow church growth.
Progress Buster #1: Interruptions
Interruptions, ranked as the number one source of discouragement on the Leadership survey, arise because pastors are on emergency call twenty-four hours a day. Those calls, coming unexpected as they do, quickly add stress. Ministers who had hoped to limit their week to a manageable number of hours suddenly find themselves adding on the draining work of comforting a grieving widow, or sitting with a family in a hospital waiting for test results. Meanwhile, important work such as writing Sunday’s sermon must be dropped, perhaps not to be picked up again until late Saturday night.
The calls of urgent need, though, are readily accepted, even gloried in, by most pastors. Explains Ed Bratcher: “I have never felt comfortable with not being able to be reached. My secretaries do try to guard my study time, but to me there is something in the role of a pastor that says the pastor should be available. When you think about it, the pastor is the one person in our society who is still readily available to people. If hurting people call up their counselor or psychiatrist, they get an appointment a week later or three weeks later. If they call their physician they may not be able to get in for several days. So when they need me as their pastor, I want to be there.”
When genuinely hurting people call, pastors know they were ordained “for such a time as this” and move with compassion.
“A man in our congregation, a sweet Southern-gentleman kind of guy about seventy years old, came down with a brain tumor about two weeks ago and died within a week,” said Steve Harris. “To be in that little room with his wife and their kids when they found out, and to have them later say ‘Thank you for being there,’—that’s when I sense I’m doing what God put me here for.”
The more frustrating interruptions are of another class. The florist calls to find out how early the church will be open on Saturday so she can set up for the wedding. The volunteer in the food pantry wants to know what happened to the food request forms they’ve been using. And there’s a constant flow of people who stop by “just to talk.” A recent Leadership cartoon depicted a pastor praying on his knees in his office. In the doorway stand three women saying, “We don’t know what you’ve been doing in here, Pastor, but we’ve been waiting five minutes to tell you there’s a broken hand dryer in the ladies’ room.”
Interruptions like these led time-management expert Ed Dayton to conclude, “If you’re a pastor, never plan on doing an hour’s work in an hour.”
Interrupting the Interruptions
How have church leaders come to grips with the unexpected ring of the phone and the unplanned-for knock on the door? Here are the adjustments, both internal and external, ministers have made to stop — or at least interrupt — their interruptions.
Plan for emergencies. That sounds like double-talk, but it reflects an idea clergy have found helpful: accept that emergency situations are a part of pastoral life, and build flex time into the schedule accordingly. Lem Tucker, president of Voice of Calvary in Jackson, Mississippi, is one leader who has reached that point of acceptance. “I’m becoming more and more convinced,” he writes, “that God’s leader will never be allowed to get too comfortable. There will always be something coming undone, one more thing careening out of control.” That reality led an East Coast pastor to “try to have some built-in time for emergencies. If I feel I need eight more hours of study in a particular week, I try to bracket ten to twelve hours for it. It helps me deal with the unexpected.”
Bunch related tasks. This doesn’t lower the number of interruptions, but it does make the uninterrupted hours far more productive. Don Gerig, a pastor for many years and now president of Fort Wayne (Indiana) Bible College, wrote in Leadership: “A friend involved in research told me his day is a success if he can spend two or three hours of solid, concentrated time on research. He knew there would be plenty of odds and ends to fill up the rest of the day.
“At first I thought he sounded lazy. The more I thought about it, looking at my own schedule, the more I understood. I had to ask myself, How many times do I seriously devote even two uninterrupted hours a day to my important projects?“
The “bunching” varies by preference, but many pastors have found it effective. One pastor does nothing but return and take calls during several two-hour blocks during his week. Another even skips meals so he does nothing on Tuesday and Wednesday but study, and then he’s finished for the week. A third reserves all his mornings for prayer and study.
When interruptions do come, sort the major from the minor. At the instant of the call, though, when a person is distraught, that isn’t easy. A Midwest pastor remembers: “One lady came to the door and wanted to pray about this friend who was seriously ill. I invited her in, and she told me how the friend had been hit by a car or something and was in the hospital. So we bowed our heads and I prayed for her friend. The lady left much relieved. I found out later she was talking about her pet rabbit.”
As his story reminds us, not every situation demands a five-alarm response. Many could wait until later in the day or later in the week. Leith Anderson, pastor of Wooddale Church in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, explains: “At seminary a counseling professor told us, ‘Anything that absolutely must be handled now — you’re not capable of handling anyway.’ That eliminates most emergencies. However, many of us in helping professions are driven primarily by a need for affirmation, and so we accommodate ourselves to everybody. That leads to burnout.”
Adds an East Coast pastor who is now on the mission field, “I found that when I started asking people who ‘had to see me right now’ if they could wait a week, very often an interesting thing would happen. They would come into my office and say, ‘Pastor, you know when I couldn’t see you last week, I was really upset. But since I couldn’t, I just kept crying out to the Lord about my problem, and he has given me a new peace about it. In fact, I feel like I’ve been able to forgive this person about the thing.’ In many cases, because the people had to wait, they began to work out some of the problem themselves.”
Progress Buster #2: Lethargic Church Boards
The second thing that blocks pastors from seeing any progress is more intense and more difficult to deal with, as a Southem pastor we’ll call Keith found out.
“When I first came to the church,” Keith recalls, “it was in a state of gridlock. As close as I could determine, no decision had been made in the church for several years. I quickly found out why.
“The committee on committees appointed the nominating committee. But the nominating committee selected the committee on committees. Some five people rotated back and forth every year between the two and thus were able to control everything that happened in the church. Plus, they had set it up so their friends who were officers in the church, like the Sunday school superintendent, were full-fledged voting members of every single committee. So five or ten people were stopping three hundred from doing anything.
“For the first six months I was here, there were only three items on the agenda of a committee, no matter which committee it was: who was going to paint the church sign in front, how we were going to get rid of the pigeons on the front porch, and when we were going to start using purchase orders. But they didn’t want to decide anything about these issues; they just liked to get the discussion started and sit back and listen.”
Though this may be an extreme case, you don’t need to have a convoluted board structure to see progress blocked. It just depends on the people on the board. “The greatest time of discouragement in my ministry came at a finance committee meeting,” wrote one pastor on the Leadership survey. “The men there objected to our giving scholarships of $20 per child for church camp that summer. Their rationale was ‘No one ever gave us anything’ and ‘People don’t need the money but will take it if it’s given.’ By contrast this group of men would have spared no expense on the maintenance of the building they had built. As a result of that decision, the CE director, who was the best we’d ever had, decided to resign. And we had no kids at camp that year.
“I am in the process of leaving,” he continued. “I have led them as far as I can.”
Probably no one has described the spirit of boards like these better than Chuck Swindoll. In The Quest for Character he writes of a fellow pastor who had encountered “the wrath of Khan” for trying something innovative. “Any leadership position, including ministry’s, has its occupational hazards. But there are a few tests that can be endured only so long. One of them is rigidity.
“I don’t know a better word for it. It’s tough enough to deal with folks who choose to live that way themselves, but when they require it of us, ultimately restricting our vision for ministry, it becomes unbearable. Perhaps it is the closest we get to feeling suffocated.”2
Quiet Consolation
You can expect pain — intense — in such a situation. Robert Boyd Munger, author of My Heart — Christ’s Home, knew the difficulty as a young Presbyterian pastor. “When you try to change people who have never really known wholehearted commitment to Christ, and the old leadership is threatened by the younger eager beavers, you have tensions. I didn’t know how to handle them then, and I was too proud to let anybody know what I was going through. I just redoubled my efforts to pray and work. But the pain was acute and it lasted a year and a half. There were times when I would have welcomed anything to get me out of that situation — even death. It was intolerable. How can you stand, still believing the gospel, still convinced that Christ is Lord, and yet you do not experience the reality of his warm, living presence? When there’s nothing around that gives evidence of new life, when you see things falling apart — trouble with the choir, trouble with the youth?”
I asked Munger’s questions of pastors. They offered no quick technique but the quiet consolation that comes from being there. Here are some of their reflections.
Try to give things time was a lesson many had learned. One couple found this, on a smaller scale, after working with what they called a “brick-wall youth group.” Almost nothing positive happened for two years. But then in a few months they had more good conversations with kids than they’d had in the first twenty-two.
“When I’m tempted to get discouraged about progress with the board,” says one pastor, “I like to think about Jesus’ parable of the growing seed in Mark 4:26-29. First you have the seed, then it sprouts, then the stalk comes up, then the kernel sets on, and finally it becomes ripe. That has helped me realize that progress comes slowly, and even if all I’ve got right now is a little seed, it will keep growing.”
Keith, the pastor who encountered a board logjam, found help in trying to remove the key logs. “One lady in particular would throw an awful scene, act ugly, so people would say, ‘We don’t want to upset Clair, so let her have her way.’ So I resolved I would talk to her about it if it continued. So far, though, I haven’t had to.”
Keith also worked over a year or two to shift the board and committee structure to make it more difficult for people to hold voting positions indefinitely. That further isolated the ruling few, and today, he says, things are going fairly well.
Talking to someone outside the situation to keep perspective also helped Keith. A sluggish group of people makes you feel like Butch Cassidy when he said to the Sundance Kid, “I have vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals.” Someone from outside can keep that vision clear. When you’re tempted to put on “bifocals” just to survive, when you begin to doubt your capability as a minister, it’s time to talk with a friend. “I have a rather large long-distance phone bill,” Keith admits.
Their final words of counsel can be summed up by the words of Corrie ten Boom: “No matter how deep our darkness, He is deeper still.”
Progress Buster #3: Slow Church Growth
I love the early chapters of Acts, partly because there’s so much going on. Evangelism, conversions, healing — it’s exciting to see the fledgling church growing. You can feel the strong pulse in verses like Acts 6:7: “So the Word of God spread. The number of disciples in Jerusalem increased rapidly.” Or Acts 9:31: “Then the church … enjoyed a time of peace. It was strengthened; and encouraged by the Holy Spirit, it grew in numbers, living in the fear of the Lord.” Who wouldn’t want to experience that kind of energy and growth in a church?
Thankfully, many pastors do. Others, however, don’t. Nearly half of the pastors responding to the Leadership survey said “the rate of our church’s growth” discourages them.
Few visitors, no conversions, a trickle of new members if any — it doesn’t take much of that before you question what you’re doing. Confesses a Christian Church minister who has seen little growth in his congregation: “I’m discouraged. I ask myself, If we’re doing things right, why aren’t we growing?“
Slow growth, perhaps more than anything else, erodes a pastor’s self-esteem. Kent Hughes, now pastor of College Church in Wheaton, Illinois, writes of his experience trying to plant a church in California. “We had everything going for us. We had the prayers and predictions of our friends who believed a vast, growing work was inevitable. We had the sophisticated insights of the science of church growth. We had prime property in a fast-growing community. We had a superb nucleus of believers. And we had me, a young pastor with a good track record who was entering his prime.
“But to our astonishment and resounding disappointment, we didn’t grow. In fact, by the middle of our second year, we typically counted fewer than half the regular attenders we had in the beginning. Our church was shrinking, and the prospects looked bad. This can’t be, I thought. I’m not living up to my expectations. I’m failing!“
What makes the weekly attendance such a powerful influence on pastoral self-esteem? What gives the numbers their sting?
For one thing, “as pastors, we count the sheep,” says a Lutheran minister. “That’s a good and natural tendency. I think Jesus did that, and if we are to be shepherds, we need to be aware of individuals as well.” No matter how large or small the church, there’s a sense of care for each member. So when a member leaves, it hurts.
Surgeons have found that when a limb is amputated, the patient almost always sinks into depression. The same is true in the body of Christ: when a member is missing, the rest of the body, and particularly the pastor, feels it. In the words of a Presbyterian pastor: “It’s hard to recognize that some people will leave. That must always be discouraging, because the Lord said, ‘None have I lost.'”
The second factor is that pastoral work is with people and of a spiritual nature, so it’s not easy to measure progress. As a result, the few physical factors — what one pastor calls “body, buck, and brick” — receive extra, and often undue, attention. “Look at the speakers and leaders for any ministerial gathering or church conference,” says a pastor frustrated over his church’s lack of growth. “The speaker is always someone who is ‘minister of the 4,000-member First Church, which six months ago had twenty members.’ You begin to wonder what’s wrong with you, even if nothing is said outright.”
Too, there’s a self-defeating rule of thumb at work, a Methodist pastor points out: Decline is more discouraging, proportionately, than growth is encouraging. “When there’s growth, I say, ‘The Lord added this.’ But when there’s decline, I say, ‘What am I doing wrong?’ I blame myself.” As a result, as one pastor said, “I don’t know about other people, but for me it’s always a struggle between a sense of failure and success.”
Neutralizing the Numbers
Most of the adjustments pastors have made to lessen the discouraging effect of sluggish attendance figures are internal. Truly changing our approach toward something so closely tied to self-esteem takes time.
“I’ve finally come to the place now,” one pastor told me, “where I realize that if I am a faithful preacher of the gospel, that’s enough. Faithful is the only thing God ever asked us to be.”
“How long did it take you to get to that point?” I asked him.
“As long as I’ve been preaching — about forty years.”
There are, of course, external measures that can boost attendance, but increased size does not guarantee a freedom from the ongoing comparisons. One pastor I know leads a vital, multi-staff church of three hundred. He would be the envy of many smaller-church pastors, but he doesn’t feel that. Instead he looks at the churches of five hundred and one thousand that are nearby and questions what he’s doing wrong. Freedom comes not from size, which is a relative and shifting measure, but from an internal sense of worth based on entirely different criteria.
Here are some of the ways pastors have fine-tuned their thinking about growth over the years to lessen their discouragement.
The first several focus on the word acceptance. A Baptist pastor found freedom when he came to accept his church at the size it was. “I used to be bothered a lot when attendance was down. I remember one Sunday night coming into a sanctuary that holds two hundred and seeing three people. That’s a real downer, especially if you think the others are staying away from you.
“But one thing that helped me,” he continues, “was hearing Garrison Keillor on ‘Prairie Home Companion.’ He was talking about a small town, and he said its motto was ‘We are what we are.’ That phrase stuck with me as I came to this church. I decided I was going to love what we were. Not that we don’t want to grow, but on a Sunday morning when the people gather, we are what we are. And I can accept that.
“I’m not saying I’ve fully conquered my feelings about size. But early in my ministry I’d look out and see the empty pews. Now I’m looking at the people who are there and trying to say something for them.”
Accepting your current situation, no matter how limiting, as a call from God, is another lift. But oh, how difficult that is! Martin Luther, that towering giant of the Reformation, once confessed, “Next to faith this is the highest art — to be content with the calling in which God has placed you. I have not learned it yet.” Maybe one reason it’s so hard is that we consider how much more useful we could be in a larger setting. But that line of reasoning leads to despair. Then it’s time to remember the stinging yet ultimately helpful words of Oswald Chambers: “Notice God’s unutterable waste of saints, according to the judgment of the world. God plants His saints in the most useless places. We say, ‘God intends me to be here because I am so useful.’ Jesus never estimated His life along the line of the greatest use. God puts His saints where they will glorify Him, and we are no judges at all of where that is.”3
A third road to acceptance is expressed by Phil Sackett of the Excelsior (Minnesota) Bible Church: “I had to learn to view the church not as my church but as the Lord’s church. As long as I felt responsible for it — that how it progressed reflected on me and that I had to make it go — I lost a lot of energy. I had to come to the point of saying, ‘It’s his church, and if he doesn’t want it to grow the way I would like it to, I’m willing for him to use it as it is.’ I had to detach myself from the church enough that its ups and downs didn’t totally sap my resources. That was a turning point for me.”
A realization that has strengthened Steve Harris is that the life issues people face in a small church are just as difficult and significant as the issues in a larger church. The importance of the struggles and need for pastoral ministry are no less great. “Some people in Maple Lake Baptist Church, just a teeny country church on the side of Highway 55, are struggling right now with their marriages,” he says. “One woman’s husband is dying of cancer. A young guy is struggling with whether to go to seminary. A girl who just graduated from high school has been wondering What am I going to do with my life? Those are significant issues; they can’t get any bigger. And what God says through me to these people is a gift.”
In addition, some clergy have embraced the benefits of their smaller size. “I’m not sure I would be able to be a pastor of a ‘superchurch,'” one says. “I gain encouragement from dealing with people on a one-to-one basis, where you can really have a spiritual conversation and deal with people’s needs. And I probably wouldn’t be able to do as much of that.” Adds another pastor, “When you have nothing, you have nothing to lose. So you can become quite bold and you can take risks.”
Others have tried to find different yardsticks for their ministry, ones that are more in keeping with the pastorate’s fundamental nature. Since a pastor is called to “equip the saints,” some look not to the number of saints but to the number equipped. “I was a fair-haired youth worker who had hundreds of kids coming to meetings,” remembers one pastor. “But looking back, if I had to gauge my success, it wouldn’t be by the number who came, but the number whom I nurtured to become Christian leaders. I can think of six people who are still ministering today, helping what’s now a third and fourth generation of kids. That’s what makes me feel good.”
Ultimately, though, pastors in smaller situations find encouragement because they see God at work, even when that’s barely discernible. It’s that vision, the ability to see the Spirit of God brooding over a church, that brings staying power. Oswald Chambers knew that when he wrote: “The test of a man’s religious life and character is not what he does in the exceptional moments of life, but what he does in the ordinary times, when there is nothing tremendous or exciting on.… Don’t give in because the pain is bad just now; get on with it, and before long you will find you have a new vision and a new purpose.”4
Visions may sound flimsy, but when they’re “engendered by the Scripture and supported by the Spirit” as one pastor put it, they sustain, they push through obstacles, they overcome.
There’s a picture of that in the rest of the story of Robert Mills’s vision, the Washington Monument. From the year Mills died, no work was done on the Washington Monument for a long twenty-five years. But somehow the dream Mills had had almost fifty years earlier wouldn’t die. In 1880, with funds appropriated by Congress, work resumed, and four years later a cast-aluminum cap was placed over the granite tip. Today Mills’s monument stands as the tallest masonry structure in the world.
Last year, over a million people came to see the realization of his dream.
Ron Schick, “Monumental America,” Modern Maturity (August-September 1986), 54-55.
Charles R. Swindoll, The Quest for Character (Portland, Ore.: Multnomah, 1987).
Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1935), 223.
©1988 Christianity Today
